Not a business is larger than its employees. Finding and keeping the best professionals is a constant task for any company, and this is even more important for entities that are just stepping on a foreign market. This is where Advance Human Capital can help. The company offers highly professional and effective recruiting services, corporate trainings and outsourced HR, providing to its clients the most effective solutions designed to meet best the particular business's requirements.

Adriyana Miteva, Talent Acquisition General Manager at Advance Human Capital, shares more about the company's expertise, goals and plans. A graduate of University of Economics – Varna in corporate marketing, she has a significant experience as an HR consultant and has worked for Bulgarian and foreign companies where she got to know the specifics of different businesses sectors.

Which companies can Advance Human Capital be of help?

Advance Human Capital is an HR company built after the American example. Our professionals are not only recruiters who post vacant job listings and sift through CVs, but people who take care to get to know and analyse the client's business model, identify all of its strong and weak points, compare them to the local market of professionals and place set them in a model designed in accordance with the demand of the particular specialists and the specifics among this type of workforce. Having this in mind, the companies we are most often of use are the ones in sectors with specific demand of human potential: the IT business, the call centres, the managing positions.

What are your advantages in hiring of professionals?

AHC is probably the only company in the segment in Bulgaria that managed to build an incredibly detailed data base, using our significant experience with the specifics of selection of IT specialists, gathered in our own analytical software that is able with an accuracy of 93 percent to analyse the data and to generate results, thus helping us to advice our clients. For example, if a company decides to open an office in Bulgaria and needs three particular types of employees, we can say with a big degree of accuracy in which cities the company will find these people faster, what salary it has to offer, what additional social and personal conditions it is expected to provide, and who are their biggest competitors in the region or the country.

Besides this, in the past nine months we have started a new programme of ours, Talent Management. About 35 highly qualified specialists from the top 3 most demanded IT positions in Bulgaria and Europe participated in it. With this service, these specialists trust in our hands the management of their career, providing us with sides they want to develop. Our task is to find the best companies for any of them, which will offer what our specialists look for, and on the behalf of the professionals to negotiate the best conditions for them. Thus we are able to operate with some of the best professionals on the market and to offer them to companies that are ready to pay fair for their services. On the other hand, the professionals' interests are protected with us to the greatest degree, both legally and regarding the accountancy, as specialists with years of experience take care of them.

What should a company arriving on the Bulgarian market know about the local workforce?

First, it should forget everything it thinks it knows. It should carefully research the local traditions and how it competitors succeed, and to try to not to stipulate its own working standards from the very beginning. What is important is the setting of the company to be smooth and without the appearance of bad image, as the first year always is indicative if the company will develop successfully or will be labeled unfriendly and with inadequate management.

This is where Advanced Human Capital comes, with providing advice throughout the crucial first year of the business operation. We take care that the company's establishment goes as smooth as possible and that its first employees become something like brand ambassadors among their friends and professional circles. When this is achieved, selection of the best staff becomes something that happens on its own.

How will the market of qualified specialists in Bulgaria evolve in the next few years?

The trend is towards decrease of numbers of qualified staff. Plenty of people were attracted by international companies and the few who stayed in Bulgaria are pampered by their employers. For a large number of the companies it is now obligatory to invest in the training of their own specialists, as the universities are not capable to provide these specialists to the business. In April, Advance Human Capital opened its own IT academy, AdvanceAcademy.bg, with the goal to build professionals who at a later moment will fill the vacant positions in the sector. All of our study groups were packed in the first week of our call, and the interest of the business in our graduates is already significant. I expect that a day will come when Bulgaria will start importing specialists from Serbia, Ukraine, Russia, Macedonia and Turkey.

What should a company in Bulgaria do to create a stable team with small staff turnover?

Attitude has always been the 'secret.' The management should be close to its staff, should know what they like and dislike, and what they need. It is important to create an internal community, a small corporate family of employees.

According to a survey by the INSEAD.edu institute, close relations between the employees, like the ones between family members and friends, increase their responsibility towards the company. This limits the desire for a job change, and in a significant degree minimises the workforce turnover.

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